We recently had an interesting set of client meetings.
We visited an oilfield distributor to discuss how Rig CallOut could help their operations with a reduction in check-in calls, accurate ETAs resulting in on-time deliveries, and faster billing through digital POD. In first discussions the company told us, "Rig CallOut is not for us, our shipments are always on-time."
We questioned – “Always?” They responded – “Well at least 98% of the time.”
We asked how they tracked this metric and their response, though alarming, was a fairly common one – “If our customers don’t call us to complain – it’s on time.” Yikes, we thought to ourselves. How unfortunate to use this perception as a defining metric. It’s almost as dangerous as leaning on “it’s the way we’ve always done it.”
Cut to just a couple of days later. We landed in another meeting – this time with an exploration company. As fate would have it, this company happened to be a customer of the supplier we had just visited.
Again, we were discussing the benefits of shipment visibility Rig CallOut can provide. This potential customer said “Oh wow, we would love to have that visibility. We have one customer who is notoriously late with shipments. Nothing detrimental, but always hours off schedule. Just late enough to cost us some stand-by time, or time on the phone inquiring, on every shipment.”
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Guess who they were talking about. Yep. The same company who told us they were on-time 98% of the time.
The supplier was blissfully unaware that their shipments had been tagged as a problem child with one of their most important clients. How long can you remain a problem child before you're removed from the approved list? Once you're removed from the list - how hard is it to get back into good graces?
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As "they" always say it's exponentially cheaper to maintain an existing customer than to woo a new one.
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